Progressives force Little Sisters of the Poor into court (for what feels like the 700th time)

Thursday and Friday, the Little Sisters of the Poor will be in Pennsylvania and California federal courts defending themselves yet again from lawsuits by Democratic state Attorneys General Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Xavier Becerra of California.

In two separate court cases, the Little Sisters, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, are asking the court to protect their religious exemption to the Department of Health and Human Services mandate. If you recall, this was finalized in November following a four-year legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The new rule protects religious nonprofit groups, including the Little Sisters, from providing folks with the birth control pill.

Despite this, and the fact that there are a blessed myriad of ways for women to retrieve birth control, California and Pennsylvania are suing to take those rights away, forcing the Little Sisters to court. Naturally, Becket is arguing that the new rule protects their religious beliefs (which were always protected anyway, thanks to the First Amendment) and as is additionally required by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The court will decide whether the cases have merit.

I am tired of seeing these cases in the news. I am tired of seeing how, for what seems like the 700th time, a group of selfless nuns must defend themselves in court from the omnipotent authoritarian reach of the government, which lives and breathes to ensure not that every person has access to solid infrastructure or safety in their neighborhood, but that every person who wants to receive birth control can do so from nuns — women who devote their lives to God and the poor, shun premarital sex, rescue babies and the lost, and must be forced to deny their religious beliefs to provide said materials.

If ever there is a more asinine cause the state has endeavored in, surely this ranks in the top 10. The lawsuits have been so ongoing, and so laborious, yet they continue with such curious aggression that one wonders if some atheist sex-addicts who hate Catholicism banded together as a group and pitched this idea to the attorneys general for kicks and giggles. Indeed, it’s not nearly half as interesting or as logical as that: It’s just two government offices, driven by liberal ideology, hell-bent on forcing religious people to violate their conscience and waste time and resources defending themselves for not wanting to do so.

Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.